Samuel Shepherd (1790-1877)
}} * Veteran War of 1812 Biography Samuel Shepherd was born in 1788 in Vermont to David Shepherd and Diadamia Hopkins. His father, David Shepherd, and grandfather, Wait Hopkins, had fought in the Revolutionary War as part of Ethan Allen’s militia, the Green Mountain Boys. When the War of 1812 began, Samuel enlisted in the United States Army. The military record notes that he was 5'11" with blue eyes and light hair and light complexion. He fought in the war and was a prisoner of war in Canada for several months. One of his granddaughters recalled, "I remember hearing him tell, jokingly, that the cell in which he was confined was so filthy and his clothes so full of 'cooties' that he could put them clothes at one side of the cell and go to the other side and whistle and his clothes would come crawling over to him." In 1820 Samuel married Roxalana or Roxy Lana Ray, the daughter of one of his fellow servicemen. A few years later, the two set out on a great Western adventure. They moved out to the Western Reserve (Ohio) to settle on land granted due to Samuel’s military service. They and some of their relatives settled the town of Chagrin (now Willoughby), Ohio, not far from Kirtland, Ohio. Kirtland was the one of the major sites of the early history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Shepherd family was baptized into the Church in the early 1830s. Samuel and Roxy had eight children, Lucelia, Sarah (Garoutte), Marcus Delafayette, an unnamed baby, Fanny Jane (Van Burkleo), Julia Ann (Tanner), Rollins Don Carlos, and William Ray. The Shepherd moved to help the Church settle in Missouri, but on the way, Roxy and her newborn son William died of cholera. The next year Samuel remarried Charity Bates Swarthout, the widow of Philip Swarthout. Her children were George, Lucinda (Kinyon Coburn), Nathan, Truman, Hamilton, Harley, and Charles. When Samuel and Charity married, they had thirteen living children between them. Together they had one daughter, Lydia Shepherd (Davidson), who was born in Independence, Missouri, in 1836. Not long afterward, the “Missouri War” began in full force and the Shepherds were driven from their homes by mobs. They fled to join the Saints in Hancock County, Illinois. The Shepherds probably settled in the town of Bear Creek, because when the Saints were again driven from their homes, Samuel Shepherd was one of the men appointed to sell the property in Bear Creek. When the United States asked for volunteers to fight in the war against Mexico, the family continued their tradition of military service: one son, Marcus Delafayette Shepherd, and two stepsons, Hamilton Swarthout and Nathan Swarthout, enlisted in the Mormon Battalion and marched to California. The Shepherd family, except for two daughters who chose to remain in the Midwest, began the long trek across the continent to Utah. They traveled with the Abraham O. Smoot-Samuel Russell Company that left the Elkhorn River, Nebraska, on June 17, and arrived in the Salt Lake Valley on September 25, 1847. They settled in the Salt Lake Valley. Four years later, in 1851, a large group of Saints — mostly Southerners but also members of the large intermarried Tanner-Lyman-Shepherd family including Samuel and Charity — moved across the Mojave Desert to create a settlement at San Bernardino, California. In 1857, Brigham Young called the San Bernardino settlers back to Utah. Samuel and Charity Shepherd returned to Utah but shortly afterward returned to California. When they returned to California against Brigham Young's direction, for all intents and purposes the Shepherds left the Church. The 1860 and subsequent United States Censuses show Samuel and Charity living next to their daughter Lydia Shepherd Davidson and her family as well as members of the Swarthout family. Meanwhile, the Reorganized Church (RLDS, now Community of Christ) began international missionary efforts. One tireless missionary was James W. Gillen, later an Apostle in the RLDS Church. He headed across the continent and baptized a number of people in Salt Lake City before heading to California. There he baptized both Samuel and Charity Shepherd in 1870. After Charity Bates Swarthout Shepherd died in 1877, Samuel married an old family friend, Sarah Whitney Crandall, but died six months later on October 23, 1877, and was buried in San Bernardino. A few years after his death, members of his family had him sealed to Roxy Lany Ray in the St. George Temple, and as with so many of these old pioneers, their temple work has been redone over and over again in the years since, so their descendants should have no further concerns about that. Samuel Shepherd and his family performed many valuable services in the early days of the Church. Samuel spent the greatest part of his life on the frontier, from the settlement of the Western Reserve in the 1820s to the settlement of California through the late 1870s. He was blessed with a large posterity and they can consider the Shepherd name an honorable one Vital Records Pioneer Gravestone * Location: Pioneer Memorial Cemetery (San Bernardino) See Also * #24128130 * Samuel Shepherd * Shepherd in Rutland County, Vermont * Shepherd in San Bernardino County, California